The Declaration, the Constitution, and the Idea of Equality

By Danielle Allen Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University

Few words are more famous than these: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Yet famous as they are, these words often cause confusion. Human beings are so obviously all very different from one another that people often stumble over the idea that we are all equal. How can that be?

Crucially, human equality comes before human difference. We can spot differences among us only because we are all humans, and in that regard equal. As humans, we share a capacity for moral judgment, and an innate striving to choose actions that make tomorrow better than yesterday. This is how our drive and capacity for freedom show themselves. We are all children of God, or of nature, as we see fit. The proposition that all humans are created equal has never meant that we were all the same. Not at all. Our equality lies in the features of humanity that make us moral beings. Nor does human difference yield any kind of fixed and permanent groupings, nor determine where and how human talent in all its immense variety will show itself. The government that will best help humans flourish will start by protecting human freedom. This requires maximal space for self-government, and also government of the whole people that is also by and for the people. Not in the interest of those who govern, in other words, but in our interest.

The Declaration of Independence already began in 1776 to spell out the kind of government needed to recognize and protect human moral equality and the shared, natural drive for freedom. Its long list of grievances against King George III is carefully organized. First come complaints about violations of legislative powers, then complaints about abuses of judicial powers, then complaints about excesses of executive power. The ideas that power itself should be separated into these three categories, that each type of power should be limited in its use, and that these three powers should check and balance each other are articulated already here in the Declaration, even before we get to the Constitution.

That abstract framework of separated and limited powers, and of checks and balances in fact describes the practices necessary for recognizing and protecting human equality. Made concrete in an executive who accepts Congress’s lead on major questions and the national budget, in a Congress that by and large allows the President his pick of Secretaries, and in a judiciary that limits its rulings to narrow legal terrain, these abstract principles protect all of us from domination and shelter our status as free and equal citizens. The institutional details that bring them to life provide what the authors of The Federalist Papers called “republican safety”—protection of our basic liberties.

During the Constitutional Convention, delegate James Wilson, who would go on to be a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, read the Declaration of Independence aloud. Later during Pennsylvania’s ratifying convention, he read out the long second sentence about self-evident truths and equality. He then declared, “This is the broad basis on which our independence was placed: on the same certain and solid foundation this system is erected.”[1]

During the Constitutional Convention itself, the full body of delegates turned over their drafting work to a Committee of Detail, and that committee began by considering whether to restate basic principles or to focus on articulating the necessary instrument of governance. They concluded that the latter was their task. Their notes record the following debate about the Constitution’s preamble:

A preamble seems proper not for the purpose of designating the ends of government and human polities — This … display of theory, howsoever proper in the first formation of state governments, ( seems) is unfit here; since we are not working on the natural rights of men not yet gathered into society, but upon those rights, modified by society, and (supporting) interwoven with what we call (states) the rights of states — … But the object of our preamble ought to be briefly to (represent) declare, that the present foederal government is insufficient to the general happiness, that the conviction of this fact gave birth to this convention; and that the only effectual (means) (mode) which they (could) (can) devise, for curing this insufficiency, is the establishment of a supreme legislative executive and judiciary.[2]

In other words, the Committee on Detail and whole body of delegates left the Declaration of Independence standing as the basic principle on which the United States government was grounded. The Declaration, with its case for human moral equality, provided the foundation for the edifice now under construction, the U.S. Constitution.

The desire to recognize and build society around the affirmation of human equality has a long history. It is also a deep American story, not a 20^th century creation as is sometimes alleged. The Stoics, including the ancient Roman statesman Cicero, saw a spark of the divine in every human creature, and for the first time developed the idea that we have obligations not only to kith and kin but also to all humankind. Christianity, of course, carried that vision forward and spread it worldwide. Racial hierarchies in colonial America were contested from the earliest point. Africans who arrived earliest on the Atlantic seaboard, at Jamestown and Plymouth, were indentured, not enslaved. And in those early years, indentured servants held strikes to claim the right to vote. Chattel slavery was formalized in 1640 as a reaction to a developing egalitarianism.[3]

The principle of equality articulated in the Declaration of Independence was meant so seriously that it grounded the abolition of enslavement in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Vermont before the end of the Revolutionary War. Rhode Island arrived at the Continental Congress, prior to the issuing of the Declaration of Independence, having already taken a public position in opposition to enslavement. Some eighty years later, the Confederacy’s own Declaration explicitly rejected the American Declaration of Independence, on the grounds that the 1776 Declaration had embraced full human equality, which the Confederacy denied. America’s tradition has never been just one thing. There have always been competing streams of thought, but the egalitarian principle has been there from the beginning. Not a weak-minded invention of the 20^th century, it has time and time again won out, because the true American spirit has always been about the claim of ordinary people to full civic participation, and the vigorous defense of freedom.

This strong argument about equality in the Declaration of Independence and as the basis for the Constitution provokes a common question. Is this claim about an egalitarian American founding not contradicted by the common attribution of the authorship of the Declaration to Thomas Jefferson? After all, Jefferson held numerous people in bondage for the whole of his lifetime. We attribute to Jefferson sole authorship of the Declaration primarily because he had his tombstone inscribed, “Author, Declaration of Independence.” In fact, a committee of five members, including Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston—all but Jefferson from the northern colonies—developed the argument for the Declaration.

The text itself was drafted by Jefferson and then edited by the other committee members, especially John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, and then edited again by Congress. While Jefferson held people in bondage, Adams never did so and was always against enslavement. Franklin had owned people earlier in his life but had, by the time of the Revolutionary War, repudiated the practice and embraced abolition. While Jefferson was open to accepting human equality on the condition that white and black would live separately from one another and that Africans enjoy their natural rights and liberties in Africa, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin were two of the leading figures who transformed the language and arguments of the Declaration into a foundation for abolition of enslavement in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania before the end of the Revolutionary War. They thereby laid the foundation for the embrace of freedom and equality in a pluralistic society. Again, we see that the American tradition has always had several, various voices flowing into its complex harmonies.

These leading statesmen with formal authority were not the only ones to embrace the Declaration’s principles of equality and to put them immediately to work for the creation of a new world. Free African American Prince Hall, based in Boston, was the first advocate to use the language of the Declaration for a purpose other than revolution. He drew on it in submitting a petition to the Massachusetts legislature in January 1777 for the abolition of enslavement in Massachusetts. He wrote: “that your Petitioners Apprehend that Thay have in Common with all other men a Natural and Unaliable Right to that freedom which the Grat — Parent of the Unavese hath Bestowed equalley on all menkind and which they have Never forfuted by Any Compact or Agreement whatever.”[4]

And Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, raised from the start a question about whether the framework of laws being designed by the statesmen, and placing all power in the hands of men, could in fact serve the purpose of protecting the rights of all. She warned her husband in a letter that if the new government did not do more to incorporate women’s interests, “we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”[5] While the founders understood the importance of limited power to preserving their own equal freedoms, they had established a structure of unlimited power over women, Abigail pointed out. She predicted that this would have to change, if the promise of human equality were to be realized.

Happily, the Constitution has in it a mechanism for amendment, and so with, among others, the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 19th Amendments (which ended slavery, blocked its legacies, and gave women the right to vote), the instrument that organizes the power of our government has continually moved toward the sharing of power necessary to protect equality. The principle of equality was there from the beginning—in the foundation provided by the Declaration of Independence. But answers to the question of how we organize the powers of government to protect that equality needed to evolve over time. Those evolutions have been achieved with changes to both the Constitution and the law, through the good work of ordinary people claiming their freedom and equality.

Danielle Allen is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University. She is also Director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Harvard Kennedy School and Director of the Democratic Knowledge Project-Learn. 

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[1] Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1836), 456–57.

[2] Committee on Detail, Section IV, in Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911), 137–38.

[3] W. B. Allen, “The Mystery of America: Abolitionist from 1609; or The Perfect American,” forthcoming in [TK].

[4] “Petition for Freedom (manuscript copy) to the Massachusetts Council and the House of Representatives, [13] January 1777.” Jeremy Belknap Papers. Massachusetts Historical Society. Accessed May 11, 2025. https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=557.

[5] Abigail Adams, “Abigail Adams to John Adams, 31 March 1776.”